Unofficial news and tips about Google

June 18, 2011

Google Tests a New Interface

Another day, another Google experiment. This time, Google tests a new search button inspired by Bing and removes the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from the homepage, probably because it's no longer useful. Google Instant makes the search button unnecessary most of the time, so Google could remove it altogether. It's interesting that the new design emphasizes the search button instead of making it less prominent.

Google's experiment highlights the header of the search results pages and uses gray/red icons and labels in the vertical navigation menu. Another change is that the "cached" and "similar" links are placed in the Instant Preview box, so they're more difficult to find.

All the icons and images for this experiment are available in a sprite.

Bing is Google's main competitor when it comes to search. Whether Google likes to admit it or not, many of the design changes from the past 2 or 3 years were inspired by Bing. Some examples: the new image search interface with infinite scrolling, "more sizes" for image search, homepage backgrounds, interactive doodles, video previews. There are many UI features first introduced by Bing and later added by Google. Just install Bing's iPad app and you'll notice that Microsoft's search team creates great interfaces.

To be honest, the search result content now looks like the ad content on the original Google pages, even while the header and navigation look polished. The older interface looked more honest and clean... This one looks like its copied from some website.

That sucks. I like minimalism & clear interface, and don't need the left side panel. I want to see the number of matches (not being an English native speaker, it is useful to search in google which expression is used more often). The big blue button is unnecessary and is awful.

i prefer the cached and similar links were made easy to find... but currently i see the cached in the same line of the web address but i cant find the similar links.. ( this similar links is very useful tough... :-(